Statement on the Brutal ICE Murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Released on January 15, 2025

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is deeply alarmed and saddened by the state-sanctioned murder of Renee Nicole Good, 37, on 7 January 2026 by an Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ms. Good was a U.S. citizen. She leaves behind her wife and three children. We extend our deepest condolences to the Good family and condemn state violence against civilians in all its forms. 

Ms. Good is not ICE’s first murder victim this year. On New Year’s Eve, shortly after midnight, an off-duty ICE agent murdered 43-year-old father and U.S. citizen Keith Porter in his front yard. Immigration agents have shot at least six people in their cars since last July, two of them fatally, including Ms. Good. The other person killed was Silverio Villegas González, a father and  a cook, who was shot during ICE’s operation in Chicago last fall. 2025 was ICE’s “deadliest year in more than two decades,” according to UK newspaper The Guardian. 32 people died in ICE custody, and that may be an undercount. The Lemkin Institute is fearful that the list will grow longer as ICE continues to enjoy ever-increasing power and impunity bestowed by the fascist forces it is working to uphold. It is important to remember that ICE is shooting and killing people during military-style operations against Americans of all legal statuses that are entirely unnecessary for public safety or national security. The Administration’s hysteria about “illegals” is completely fabricated for the purpose of destroying America’s already enfeebled democratic institutions.

At the time of her murder, Renee Good was acting as a Good Samaritan. She was bearing witness to injustice and seeking to protect her community, her neighbors, and her family from the brutal tactics of ICE. She was not protesting, she was not blocking vehicles, she was stopped behind a car and watching. 

The Lemkin Institute will not offer a full analysis of the videos that have been circulating since her death. Other outlets have already done initial forensic analyses. However, we think certain points are quite important, given the U.S. government’s refusal to investigate. Good encountered a block full of heavily armed ICE officers and vehicles on a street in her neighborhood after she and her wife dropped off their 6-year-old at school. Good, who was driving, apparently stopped her car behind another vehicle, which appears to belong to ICE and which she would have to try to drive around. ICE officers quickly and aggressively approached her vehicle and began pulling on the driver’s side door, telling her to get out. When Good tried to drive away from the officers, she was shot three times at close range. In his own video of the event, the ICE officer responsible for the shooting can be heard shouting “fucking bitch” at Ms. Good after fatally shooting her. 

After the shooting ICE prevented a doctor from tending to her wounds and did not allow an ambulance to get close to the scene. Emergency personnel were forced to approach her body on foot, with no room even for a stretcher.  

The U.S. government immediately attempted to explain away this crime with lies and propaganda that targeted Ms. Good and her wife as agents provocateurs. At 12:45pm, only about three hours after the shooting, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a statement on social media that read in part: “[R]ioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.” There is no evidence of a riot or that any ICE officers were hurt in the course of murdering Ms. Good. DHS made this decisive statement of fact without any investigation at all.

At 2:28pm, President Trump, in response to a witness video of the event, wrote on Truth Social, “the woman screaming [unclear whom he means] was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car [Good] was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed that Mrs. Good was attempting to run over ICE agents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good’s attempts to get away from aggressive ICE agents an “act of domestic terrorism” and also suggested that the killer, Jonathan Ross, who served in the Indiana National Guard from 2002-2008, and as a machine gunner in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and who has been a deportation officer with ICE since 2015, was acting in “self defense.” In addition to reiterating the “self defense” justification, Vice President J.D. Vance asserted that, as a federal agent, Ross also acted with "absolute immunity,” which is not at all true. 

On January 13 DHS posted on social media a video of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller assuring ICE agents that they have absolute immunity, which DHS posted, in its words, as a “reminder.”. This is a clear promise from the Administration that ICE agents will not be held accountable for anything that they do to Americans of any legal status. 

Multiple witness accounts, videos, local news outlets, and the mayor of Minneapolis have disputed DHS’ recounting of events. Given the fact base now available, it seems impossible to argue that Good was attempting to harm anyone. In fact, she appears to have been attempting to avoid harm. Shortly before she was accosted by officers, she can be seen waving one ICE car to pass in front of her car and can be heard saying “I’m pulling out.” Four cars had easily passed by her car in the two minutes leading up to the shooting. Seconds before ICE agent Ross killed her, Good spoke to him directly from her car, saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” a clear attempt at deescalation. No video has yet been released to the public showing the killer’s face and demeanor just before he shot Ms. Good, but it appears from existing footage that in the seconds before she tried to pull away, agent Ross was escalating the situation and, given her wife’s panicked words to her (“Drive, baby. Drive!”), he and the other officers seem to have given the impression that they posed a serious threat.

The murder of Ms. Good is a terrifying and tragic outcome of ICE’s authoritarian training, its brutal tactics, and its total impunity, which has led it to treat all human life as expendable. Until Good’s murder, ICE’s victims were largely people of color, so most white Americans were able to tolerate it, even if they disagreed with it. But, as this tragedy teaches, racist violence against people of color – especially when it has a genocidal edge that creates a culture of norm inversion among foot soldiers – rarely stays neatly contained. Ms. Good’s murder in fact exposes the contempt that many ICE agents have for American citizens, no matter what their color, and the special contempt they have for women and the LGBTQ+ community. All of this has been built over decades of bipartisan militarization of the U.S. police forces, which helps explain why the Democratic Party has been weak and ineffectual in resisting the violence unleashed by the Trump regime since January 2025 and why so many Americans are seemingly unbothered by it, at least so long as the torture, disappearances, and murders have remained the problem of people of color. 

In ICE’s brutal and cruel acts since Renee Good’s shooting, and in the many Americans who are celebrating it on social media, we see the lethal confluence of three important historical trajectories 1. America’s white supremacist history of genocide and especially its slave patrols, which became today’s modern police forces; 2. Bipartisan “tough on crime” language and laws that, since the Reagan and especially the Clinton presidential administrations, have created a for-profit mass incarceration state involving several interlocking and very profitable worlds of cruelty where human life is ritually abused and thrown away; and 3. A full year of authoritarian state building, with all the violence that it involves, which has been virtually unimpeded by elected officials in either of the two political parties. These three historical trajectories have had an enormous and compounding impact on American civic life and values. 

Most importantly, Renee Good’s murder stands as a warning to all Americans that even minor acts of resistance can now be punished with lethal force by government agents. The Trump Administration’s immediate and coordinated response in support of Jonathan Ross is a very clear message: Even if you are white, we have the power to kill you when you do not stay silent and allow us to harm your neighbors, and there is nothing you can do about it. 

Citizenship means very little within the current administration’s understanding of power.

We believe that Ms. Good’s murder, and the subsequent attempts by the U.S. government to characterize it as a legitimate response to “domestic terrorism” that enjoys “absolute immunity,” together constitute a watershed moment in the Trump Administration’s relationship to the U.S. body politic and the U.S. Constitution. The White House has essentially set itself up as the enemy of the American people and has declared war on them and on the promise of the U.S. Constitution, particularly the core belief expressed in the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

The opportunity to turn things around in the U.S. is rapidly disappearing. Courageous Americans have been out on the streets since President Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard to some U.S. cities in the summer of 2025, but they have not been supported by the so-called opposition party and its party leaders, particularly Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), perhaps because those two representatives agree with President Trump’s blind support for Israel’s genocide and prioritize that commitment over all others. There are no indications that the Democratic Party leadership is changing direction in 2026.

Good’s murder occurred in the context of rising tensions across the country and particularly in Minnesota around ICE’s undemocratic terror tactics. At the beginning of December, the Trump administration deployed hundreds of federal agents to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area as part of “Operation Metro Surge.” At the beginning of this year, DHS dramatically increased ICE’s presence in Minnesota, with 2,000 agents being deployed in what acting ICE director Todd Lyons has deemed the “largest immigration operation ever.” Lyons stated in an interview with NewsMax that the role of increased ICE presence was to “root out fraud” and “arrest criminals,” referring to viral false allegations of daycare fraud related to Somali communities. In the lead up to Good’s murder, news outlets reported several disturbing incidents of federal agents terrorizing communities and employing violence not only against their targets, but also nearby witnesses to their operations. Federal agents targeted an undergraduate student outside a residence hall at Augsburg University without producing a warrant and drew weapons on staff and students witnessing the arrest. Agents had also been reported pepper-spraying crowds as well as tasing and detaining witnesses (including U.S. citizens) whom they claim to be “interfering with operations.” In this  environment of increased militarized state presence and escalating state-sanctioned violence against communities, a federal agent can murder a U.S. citizen with the support of the state and be sure that the state will be quick to demonize victims and deploy the justifications of “domestic terror” and “self defense.” 

This state-sanctioned violence has only continued to escalate in the wake of Good’s murder. President Trump has threatened that a “day of reckoning and retribution” is coming to Minnesota. Demonstrations against ICE presence and operations taking place in multiple cities across Minnesota have been met with shocking brutality from federal agents. The Bishop Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, which serves as a base of operations for ICE, has been a focal point for protests. Federal agents have detained and employed flash bangs, tear gas, and pepper balls against protestors and legal observers alerting their community to ICE presence and documenting interactions. One woman was dragged from her car by federal agents after they smashed her car’s window and used knives to cut her out of her seatbelt. Former Army combat vets and community members Chelsea Kane and Courtney Azar who have documented ICE activity in Minnesota claim that they’ve witnessed increasing incidents of aggressive and violent detainments only for people to be released shortly afterwards in addition to ICE going door to door in neighborhoods. Kane explains, "They're doing random arrests. They're not doing warranted searches, they're not doing warranted arrests, they're not going after illegals, they're going after anyone who looks like an 'other.'"  

Minnesota is a reflection of similar dynamics and tactics being employed in cities across the U.S., particularly cities deemed “immigrant friendly” by the Trump Administration. Hyper-miltarized mass deportation operations carried out by federal agents in states like Illinois, Oregon, California, New York, New Jersey, Idaho, Connecticut, Indiana, Texas, and North Carolina have resulted in mass human rights violations, including unlawful arrest, excessive use of force, arbitrary detention, and denial of due process (see our monthly human security briefs). The escalating violence against bystanders and legal observers and the Trump Administration’s quick move to label Good a “domestic terrorist” is in line with the Administration’s earlier broadening of its definition of “domestic terror.” In October 2025, the Trump Administration passed an executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terror organization and a sweeping national security presidential memorandum, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, known as the NSPM-7 (See full statement). In this order and presidential memorandum, the definition of “domestic terror” is defined broadly as being “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” “in support of the overthrow of the U.S. government,” “extremist on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostile towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” NSPM-7 adds to this broad definition by introducing the concept of “politically motivated terrorist acts” which it defines as “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.” With these sweeping yet vague definitions of “terror,” the Trump Administration can easily demonize anyone it deems undesirable and incompatible with MAGA ideology, and justify violent actions taken against what they perceive as dissent, which has now become criminalized. This extralegal environment sets the stage for future state-sanctioned murders like that of Renee Good to be carried out with impunity. 

The Lemkin Institute urges state authorities in Minnesota to effect the arrest and prosecution of the ICE officer Jonathan Ross for the killing of Renee Good. We further urge the U.S. Congress to establish a truth commission to investigate the facts of Renee Good’s murder alongside the ICE-related murders of all other Americans, documented and undocumented, at least since January 2025. 

The Lemkin Institute commends the effective organizing of communities nationwide who have responded to this heinous act and urges caution and vigilance to those who, like Renee Good, bravely show up to  protect  their communities. The Trump Administration appears to be radicalizing quickly now with President Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops to Minnesota. It is very important to remain disciplined and not engage with the Administration’s attempts to instigate a bloodbath. The Lemkin Institute urges the beleaguered American people to  stay unified in the face of this abuse of power, demonstrate solidarity with their neighbors, and continue to bear witness to state crimes. Diligently keep recording the truth, loudly express dissent, and work to protect our immigrant communities and the integrity of our Constitutional order. The world and history are watching as we near a point of no return in this Administration’s march towards dictatorship and genocide.

© 2025